Why do you see popular brands and influencers recycling their material in the span of hours?

It’s not because they’ve run out of content. It’s because of churn.

In social media (and digital marketing), we churn two things most: attention and audience.

Attention churn is the amount of attention any of our content gets. Take a look at this chart below of one of my more popular tweets:

This tweet reached half of its lifetime audience in 65 minutes, and reached 80% of its lifetime audience in slightly more than 10 hours. If this content were an important selling piece for me, I wouldn’t even get a day’s use out of it. That’s attention churn, the speed at which your audience moves onto new things.

Audience churn is the constant change in the makeup of your audience. Every day, you lose audience members. Every day, you gain audience members. Below is an example from Facebook of Net Likes, which are the Likes you get minus the people who Unlike your page:

Even in your web analytics, you’ll see this. Below is the ratio of new users to returning users for just visitors to my website from social channels in a 30 day period:

This proclaims that 2/3 of my audience which comes from social media hasn’t seen my website before. That’s a staggering number, especially if your business relies on repeat customers.

What does this mean for us?

We can’t count on our audiences having seen things that are old hat to us. We can’t count on them knowing what they should and shouldn’t do once they become a part of our community. This is the epitome of the curse of knowledge. We see what we share every day. A new audience member has seen almost nothing. What’s boring to us is fresh to them.

If your analytics look anything like mine, take three basic tactical steps to ensure your audience is always being welcomed and is always seeing the important stuff.

Ensure your properties all have welcome messages of some kind. You could put something as simple as a link in your profile, or share a daily welcome message. My daily welcome message makes up almost 5% of my campaign-based website traffic:

Make clear your top calls to action in your website design. New audience members should have no ambiguity about what you want them to do:

Consider reposting your best content on a regular basis so that different parts of your audience see it. I’m about to embark on a new organic social campaign that will share links to my latest book on a very regular basis over 30 days, to see what happens. There are plenty of software platforms and companies that will offer to do content reposting for you (for a fee, of course). You can also just do it manually, by sharing the same content at different times of day.

Audiences and attention are churning all the time. Who you talk to today can differ significantly from who you talked to yesterday. Don’t assume that everyone has seen everything you have to offer!

I recently had the pleasure and honor of guest lecturing at Bentley University’s e-Marketing course with CC Chapman. One of the questions in the Q&A was, “What are the core skills new graduates need that you look for when hiring?” What a terrific question!

The top 3 core skills all new marketers need are the ability to write, the ability to do deep analysis and extract insights, and the ability to be creative.

The Ability to Write

Writing is at the heart of modern marketing. Everything begins with writing, from sticky notes on your desk to 90,000 word books to screenplays for YouTube videos. Even great speaking leverages your ability to skillfully choose words. The problem is, most people aren’t great writers. Most people are average or slightly below average writers who can’t communicate with clarity. Download the eBooks or white papers from your company and from your competitors. Read through them. How well written are they? How persuasive are they?

I recommended that every student – and every marketing professional – become familiar with tools like SlickWrite and Hemingway. While these tools cannot fix problems with structure, logical flow, or facts, they can identify basic flaws in writing. See this post on up-cycling content for a bit more on these tools.

The Ability to Do Deep Analysis

Statistics and mathematics are core skills for today’s marketer. You must have the ability to take data, visualize it, analyze it, and turn it into insights and strategies. Many students take courses with tools like SPSS and R; when they leave university life, those skills quickly atrophy. Don’t permit that to happen. Download data sets from public sources like data.gov to keep your data analysis skills strong. Practice, improve, and expand your data analysis toolkit.

Creativity is one skill area that gets systematically beaten out of you by school and work. The ability to be creative hinges on your inputs, on how much useful stuff is in your brain that you can draw on at any given time. If all you’ve got in your head is junk, then all you’ll produce is junk. Feed your brain, especially after leaving an academic environment!

Read as many books and blogs about your industry as you practically can consume.

The more useful, usable information your mind has to work with, the more creative you can be. (this is also the basis for my previous book, Marketing Red Belt).

Write. Create. Analyze. If you can do all three of these skills well, you will be a unicorn. You’ll be a rare, valued, even treasured member of any team. There are other secondary skills that will help improve your career success as well, but if you can’t write, create, and analyze, fix that first.